An analog-to-digital converter (ADC, A/D, or A to D) is a device that converts a continuous physical quantity (e.g., voltage) into a digital number that represents the quantity's amplitude. The analog-to-digital conversion involves quantization of the input, such that a small amount of error is introduced. Moreover, instead of doing a single conversion, an ADC often performs the conversions (“samples” the input) periodically. The result is a sequence of digital values that have been converted from a continuous-time and continuous-amplitude analog signal to a discrete-time and discrete-amplitude digital signal.
A time-interleaved ADC uses N parallel ADCs where each ADC samples data every Nth cycle of the effective sample clock, where N is a positive integer greater than one. The result is that the sample rate is increased N times compared to what each individual ADC can manage.